Today I attended a Federal Government briefing at the Microsoft offices in Canberra.

The agenda covered a wide area of topics, all relevant to Government and other sectors. These are my raw notes, taken during each session. I apologise in advance if they appear incoherent; I was put to task doing manual labour at home the past two days and my hands kind of refused to co-operate when I was madly trying to write things during each session.

Briefing Agenda:

4th Industrial Revolution

Digital Transformation

Security and Trust

Service Delivery

Workplace Modernisation, and,

Cognitive Data Analysis

The 4th Industry Revolution

What does it mean when everything is connected? When everything is digital. Lines blurring between natural and synthetic.Merged natural/synthetic/AI –is the 4th Industrial Revolution. Computers provide control, 4th revolution provides AI.

Demo: CaptionBot, EmotionBot*

Deep neural network underpins AI APIs**Requires the Cloud

Skype translate went live in 2015 and provides real-time language translation underpinned by AI learning

Video: AI power accessibility

NDIS: progressive scheme to address disability. Designing for the exception.4th Industrial Revolution provides support for designing within constraints, new ways of thinking.

Biodiversity is severely at risk; Data centres are carefully located to reduce carbon footprint. Deforestation offset when building data centres; use renewable energy sources.Data centres being tested in the ocean!

Many alternative sources of power, key is to combine them effectively. Need to eliminate fossil fuel use.AI ML can learn a house’s power usage patterns. Use Tesla battery as data source.

Industrial decline is not a given in Australia; there will be disruption, but also opportunities. Automation needs maintenance; training.Baxter: automated industrial automation. Can learn and adapt, low cost per hour (<$5/hr); just the tip of the iceberg.

Oyster farms can take advantage of salinity sensors and AI to understand when to harvest.Automation does threaten many traditional jobs. Unemployment rises perhaps unavoidable without growth/redistribution. GDP and wage rises decouple; standards of living plateau?Work adapts to be outcomes driven; redefine”work”. Retain, re-educate.

Demo: HoloLens

HoloLens teleportation. Record and replay interactions from multiple locations. 3D rendering can repay in different scales.Minecraft with an AI layer sits on top. Minecraft Malmo(?). Train AI in simplified world.The summary. Harness the disruption. Reduce the wealth gap. Technology as a tool now advanced to augmented tooling.Augmentation can allow breakthroughs in health, medicine; cure or relax disabilities. New hospitals now considering Cloud options to unencumber the physical facilities; concentrate focus on patients.

Freedom. What if we could passively read thoughts/emotions? Ethics. Surveillance. Privacy. How do we make the digital world safe and private? Humans won’t trust technology without controls/privacy.Technology might be the easy part. Applying it safely and earning trust is the hard part.

Chatbots introduced as cognitive services; launched with a Singaporean Government, supports transactions too.Worried about sovereign borders, Estonia has established a digital embassy in the cloud. You can become an electronic citizen of Estonia. Electronic services available to service online citizens.

Another innovation: Blockchain used to determine the expenditure of grant money.

Chatbot reference architecture; lodge KBs into a knowledge base and use AI to leverage broad data sources. Augmented by humans.Translation bots, sentiment, spell check, LUIS (determine intent). Give the client multiple channels to interact. Services (apps, traditional e.g. Email). Cyclic feedback loop.Chatbot can answer questions based on KBs and can lodge applications, transactions. In future, phones could detect you’re at an airport and automatically lodge paperwork.Does technology start to make us dumber by doing these tasks for us? Who knows the details underpinning Machine Learning? How do we stay educated and intelligent.

Security and Trust

Four points:

Transparency,

privacy,

compliance,

security

Transparency – Customer data is only for the customer.Privacy – Compliance with privacy laws. Implementation of security controlsCompliance – A number of compliance features, particularly to empower clients to be compliant. Security by designSecurity – Designed by default

State sanctioned threats, targets any organisation. Digital espionage has changed, wide audience.Phishing is prevalent. Turns an attack into an insider threat.Interconnected world makes this a lot more powerful & dangerous.Analysis of a phishing email (read my blog for more on this). Telstra phishing scam looks very similar to the legitimate email.What’s the Government doing?

Can’t ignore people. Work with peers, industry partners, Government (all partners)Cyber security is a team sport. Share, support, transparency. Goal is to make you a hard target, no one is invulnerable.Attribution shouldn’t be a primary focus when dealing with an active incident.

People interacting with one arm of an organisation might be relationally important to other arms, without anyone knowingConsumer experience is important. Social media, consumer opinions online. Customers are inclined to pay for a better consumer experience. Customers will leave a brand due to bad experiences with customer service.– Improve interactions– Gain deeper insights– Do more with less

Microsoft offers business viability / value assessment. Proven assessment process, scales to a range of customer situations, structured (tooling) to provide specific outputs based on a long history of expertise.

Productivity/Office

The Modern WorkplaceTraditional bricks and mortar approach is out of date. Modern workplace favours flexible arrangements.

Yammer introduces social media as an Enterprise tool. Good company engagement.Huge focus on mobility. Works on many devices, single credentials, access same data across different devices and platforms.Collaborate, intranet and extranet options, removes IT maintenance aspects

Idea: build a bot for Sanders Technology so people can ask for article recommendations! Use articles as source to help readers

Templates already available:

That’s all for now..

About Rob Sanders

IT Professional and TOGAF 9 certified Enterprise Architect with nearly two decades of industry experience, 18 years in commercial software development and 11 years in IT consulting. Check out the
"About Rob" page for more information.

Post navigation

Stuff to cover the hosting costs

Disclaimer

Privacy: Ads are generated on this site. Google may collect cookies about your interests to make ads more relevant. To Opt out or find more information, see this blog or also see the Google Privacy Center